If I may butt in... Aaron J. Seigo wrote: > i completely understand that this sort of > short-term-gain-in-spite-of-long-term-pain-and-not-truly-being-in-my-best-interest > > is something we've made a cornerstone "feature" of our culture of consumerism > and sociopolitical apathy, but that doesn't mean i like it or respect the > practitioners of it.
While I certainly prefer to use free software and do so whenever possible, I will use proprietary wares if I have to in order to get a job done. While it's fine for me to be an idealist and choose to only use free wares, it's not fine for many of the people I do business with. They expect me to be able to exchange information with them and I have to ensure that I'm able to do so or I'm out of business. Refusing to use proprietary wares in *all* circumstances is a great example of cutting off my nose to spite my face. I'm sure I'd be very happy in my refrigerator box down by the river with my Linux machine to keep me warm. Thankfully, many of the FOSS applications out there allow this information exchange to take place (like OOo being reasonably compatible with MS Office)), but there are many examples where I have to use proprietary wares to conduct my business. Skype is one glaring example. It's great that I want to use Gizmo or Open Wengo, but when a conference call is taking place on Skype, I can either chose to participate or not. The ideal situation where I get the opportunity to attempt to convince a handful of people who don't know and don't care about the issues surrounding free software to change to an open solution in time for this Tuesday's conference call isn't going to happen all that often. Of course when I'm in charge of the conference call we don't use Skype :) True idealism is painful and it has a high cost. We all have lives to lead and business to conduct and we don't always get to do those things with like-minded people. Those of us in this boat have decisions to make every day about where the line is for us, and frequently we're going to disagree with each other because...well...ultimately it's a personal choice. J _______________________________________________ clug-talk mailing list [email protected] http://clug.ca/mailman/listinfo/clug-talk_clug.ca Mailing List Guidelines (http://clug.ca/ml_guidelines.php) **Please remove these lines when replying
